Sites or people with lots of information in general, some good, some bad, some possibly crazy:

• Elliott Wave International.
• Karl Denninger.
• The Evil Speculator.
• Gerald Celente.
• Nouriel Roubini (a/k/a “Dr. Doom”) (see also here).
• Nassim Taleb.
• Greg Mankiw.
• Gary Becker and Judge Richard Posner.

Some interesting specific links:

• Alternative data on key economic metrics.
• A report from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency showing where things were last fall.
• Flow of Funds report from the Federal Reserve.  The table on page 2 is especially interesting.  So is page 14, but page 15 is the best.  In Q3 2007, the federal government accounted for 14% of total borrowing in the United States; in most quarters it’s around that or lower.  In Q3 2008, it was 88.5%.  In other words, nearly all of the credit extended to anyone for an entire three month period was extended to the federal government.  Last year looks almost nothing like any other period in decades.
• Where we may really be in the housing bubble.
  
• The Challenge Before America.
• Denninger’s thoughts on pensions.
• The second bubble in housing?
• Optimism.
• The $2 trillion (in one go) bailout proposal.
• Bob Prechter on 1987 and the current market, back in 2007, complete with charts and graphs.
• All-time record-setting low rates from the Bank of England (which is 315 years old).
• SmartMoney.com on market timing and investing for 20- and 30-somethings.
• The shadow banking system (Wikipedia link, but just go through the article footnotes or search for that phrase and you’ll find ample substantive material on this one).

In any case, this chart correlating Great Depression DJIA readings with news clips is an invaluable reminder of where we likely stand. Check it out.

For reference: this is only 8 days after the $7.4 trillion estimate and only 14 days after the $4.284 trillion estimate. That’s $4,216,000,000,000 in two weeks.

If you really want a fright, keep reading. If we were to keep spending at this rate through the first 100 days of the Obama presidency (149 days from now), the tab for the crisis would hit a whopping $53,370,285,714,285. That’s about 4 times GDP, 4 times the national debt prior to the crisis, and 21 times what the federal government receives in taxes each year. That would only be, oh, about $177,901 for every man, woman, and child in the country. Chump change.

There are many events not listed in that slide show, of course. Two of the most notable: the Civil War ($60.4 billion in 2008 dollars, for both sides) and World War I ($253 billion in 2008 dollars).

For comparison, $4.28 trillion is approximately 31% of 2007 US GDP. It’s also 167% of 2007 federal tax revenues. How’s that for deficit spending?

You may bring your eyebrows back to earth now.

* Some of this money is in the form of loans. Many of these loans are to companies hemorrhaging cash faster than they can borrow it and are explicitly designed as relief against bad assets, however, and the crisis is hardly over. So, counting this money as lost is only wise.

(h/t Greg Mankiw).

P.S. In case you were wondering what the current DJIA dividend yield is (click the link above to see why this is relevant), you can see that here.